Women, Performance and the Material of Memory: The Archival Tourist, 1780–1915 by Laura Engel (review)

Laura Engel's Women, Performance and the Material of Memory: The Archival Tourist, 1780–1915 theorizes professional archival research as a kind of experience tourism (a tourism that centers on ostensibly unique activity, unavailable in ordinary life) and presents a study of the material remains of several women artists, aiming to better understand the lives of these women in their day as well as their relevance to ours. Engel observes that scholars, while claiming to be anything but touristic in their relation to archives and research locations, typically act in ways one could see as exactly that: admiring of situation and subject, seeking authentic intercourse with other humans through apparently direct encounter, and staking a greater self-knowledge against a "foreign" subjectivity and past (3). As this statement indicates, Engel aims at dynamism by pointedly mixing her metaphors: time is place, tokens of death are signs of life, publicity screens privacy, and more pervasively, materiality is always mediated by performance. Engel ultimately wishes to refashion scholarly practice and make the past the property of at least a broader public than the academy. "To consider oneself a tourist," she argues, "deliberately shifts the role of the academic, calling into question her authority and essential knowledge" (3). Doing so also reverses the relation of subject and object and breaks down the sequence of time, to allow "for a self-conscious mediation between ourselves and the materials we study, highlighting the ways in which particular material objects connected to technologies of image-making disrupt a traditional relationship between who is studying and what is being studied" (4). To my mind, what Engel argues for is not experience tourism per se as a model for archival research, but rather a kind of self-conscious tourism informed by that field of study; she argues for a research enacted by a sophisticated "archival tourist" who knows both what she could and should not be doing in inspecting the traces of other lives. Such work does not immediately translate to a broad public, in my opinion, but may do so to other scholars who seek to foreground scholarly responsibility and interpretive ethics through intentionally playful subjective encounters with archives, and especially to Victorianist scholars interested in portraiture and theater life of that period.

Engel takes performance as her keynote for two reasons. First, tourism studies asks that we think through performance—that we read the authenticity and experience that (archival) tourists seek as always managed, staged, as well as performed, both by the historical actors who populate the archive and the tourists themselves. In other words, the tourist encounter should be understood as both scripted and open to interpretive play. And second, the material traces studied by Engel are those of women artists who all bore a relation to acting, drama writing, and display across the long nineteenth century. Engel's first case study is that of Elizabeth Inchbald, actress and playwright; Inchbald's "pocket diary [is] an embodied archive—that is, an object and receptacle of information that is literally and figuratively tied to the body" (28) that captures the "ephemerality of performance" (16) as well as a "shadow archive" of counter-normative lives (31). In this case, the lives archived are that of both the working woman Inchbald and her friend Mary Wells, an actress whose bold working and social life is warped and shadowed by a scandalous reputation. Diary references to particular clothing items and to Wells are used by Engel to narrate a story of thoughtful public performance of self and wellness, and of fraught intimacy between women. Engel again threads through both artifacts and formal portraits in her chapter on the Siddons sisters (daughters of the famed actress Sarah Siddons); what the shadow archive of written correspondence allows Engel to do is flesh out the representations drawn by Thomas Lawrence and challenge that artist's self-centered representation of the two...